Do you know how polling works and for what purpose?
I don’t know why everyone is so anxious to defend these people. I suspect that if we had a properly administered poll result that indicated 99% of republicans supported executing all democrats, people would be rushing to say “99%? That’s not all republicans!” or “I’m sure democrats would do the same thing, both sides are the same, you’re just too blind to see it, unlike me who is super smart”
You might want to tell him he won and he’s POTUS because he sure as hell doesn’t act like it.
He’s the one fond of childish insult nicknames for people and I’m according him all the respect he shows for the office.
That they asked first about voter fraud makes this (slightly, at least) sound like a push poll – if “Would you support a hypothetical call from Trump for postponing the 2020 election” was the first question, then I think it’s likely the results could be significantly different.
Imagine a similar poll in December of 2016, asking several questions first about various accusations and ethical problems of Trump, then asking Democrats if they would support a hypothetical call by Obama to postpone the inauguration until these investigations were completely resolved. I think it’s likely that the poll findings would show some non-trivial number of Democrats would support it. Don’t know if it would be this high, though.
Not that such results aren’t troubling in any case.
I don’t see any reason to believe that this wasn’t a normal representative sample, though.
Or perhaps you’re fond of childish insult nicknames too.
Shitty poll yields shitty results. Next up: water is still wet.
Man, it must be a lot of work jumping that shark. 
But, yeah…I really am super smart. Good looking too. I don’t always drink beer, but when I do I always go for…er, actually, I’m a fan of Guinness. I think Dos Equis is for gringos…
Yeah, I read your use of that term as meaning “can’t get anything done” rather than “lost the election”.
Interesting. Do you also enjoy banging your head against a wall? 
Do you know how push polls work?
I am not “defending these people”. I just think the numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. It’s still an uncomfortable result.
There’s a joke in here somewhere about notifying ICE.
Well, if you plan to do that towards me I’ve been a US citizen since 1965 and served in the military, my wife was born in the US and I have 4 ‘anchor’ babies to boot (all grown up now and hiding well in US society), so I don’t think you will be all that successful.
Leaving aside the postponing the election question, I wish the headlines for polls like this would stop phrasing it as “X% of Group Believe Y”
The poll questions don’t ask what they believe, and there’s no way to know what they believe.
If you ask the question, “Who won the popular vote?” and 80% of Repubs say Trump, it doesn’t mean they believe it, it just means they’re willing to say it.
I’m not trying to give them excess credit for being in touch with reality
It may be a faulty poll, I’m not defending that. I was attacking the idea that even if it were a valid poll, we couldn’t condemn republicans because, you know, they didn’t poll all of them. Whenever we see something like this - what reprehensible views are common among Republicans, there are always people who try to rush in to tell us why this doesn’t really mean anything and that how republicans and democrats are always equal no matter what on every issue and in no way is one side ever worse than the other and if you think so you’re just partisan, and I wonder why everyone - even people who are not republicans or republican sympathetic - is so anxious to rush in and tell us republicans aren’t horrible for holding horrible views.
They don’t need no stinking evidence. Keep in mind, you’re talking about people who thought that voting for Donald Trump for President was a sound choice. I wouldn’t ask any of them if they thought it was sunny today.
I think it’s good to get a little bit of background on other posters occasionally. I am curious, does “I’ve been a US citizen since 1965” mean you were foreign-born and naturalized in 1965, or were you born in 1965? And what does the word “gringo” mean to you? I always took it to mean “Americans”, but maybe you view it as short-hand for “whites” or perhaps “white Americans”. Would stereotypical Canadians be gringos in your perspective? What about Hispanic Americans? Or Icelanders (Icelandians? Icelandites?)?
Polling is not necessarily scientific; it’s a sampling of a larger population. But the more valid the polling methodology, the more applicable it is to a larger population. I am not familiar with this particular poll’s methods, but if one were to accurately apply a random sampling methodology, then these numbers are troubling.
Moreover, it seems consistent with a lot of the reaction to Trump’s campaign and presidency. There can be no question that Trump has behaved in an overtly authoritarian manner, and he still gets strong support from the party largely responsible for voting him into office. Most republicans are supporting laws the support voter restrictions as well. Republicans might not necessarily be coming from a bad place - they might genuinely believe that their country is under attack from illegal aliens who are registering to vote. The problem is, the facts don’t support that belief and they endorse undemocratic solutions to democratic problems that aren’t really problems in the first place. I think the real problem that republicans have is that they are afraid they will get out-voted by a majority of people whom they don’t regard as their equals.
Three years is an eternity in politics. If a poll in 2014 had told me Donald Trump would be president I’d have ignored it.
Winning the popular vote is not meaningless. It means that more people were willing to see the other person in the job than you. It would be nice if any President elected under such circumstances were to govern with at least some cognizance of that fact.
The timing really doesn’t matter here. If the poll was “would you like to execute all black people if given the chance in 2020?” and 60% of republicans said yes, that would be a problem even though 3 years is a long time in politics. Holding the view that your side should be able to postpone elections if it suits them is inherently negative and dangerous.
Yeah, and nobody on the Democratic side wants Donald’s Election nullified because the New York Times and WaPo and HuffPo et al had a collective meltdown hissyfit at being ignored by the electorate.
It seems more negative and dangerous to let the Media have the power to replace the duly elected fool than to accept the verdict for another 3 years.
I’ve worked in market research for several decades; market research uses essentially the same concepts of sample and survey design that political polling does.
If they have done a good job of designing their sample – that is, if they have been rigorous about making sure that their sample of 1300 or so respondents are representative of the larger population (that is, the correct proportions on various demographic dimensions, like age, sex, education, ethnicity, region of country, etc.), then a sample of 1300 is likely to be statistically pretty close to what you would see if you were able to survey everyone. It might not come out to exactly that 50% number, but the odds are very high that it’d be somewhere in the range of 45% to 55%.
But, that may be a big “if”. Sample design in any kind of market research (including political polling) is increasingly difficult, as people screen their calls, don’t want to be bothered, etc. Online surveying has become the norm outsides of political polling, but the people who are online and willing to take surveys may not be entirely representative of the broader population, either.